It’s Black Friday — sorry, Blue Friday — and nothing says “holiday spirit” like spending the morning with investigative journalist and all-around mensch David Shuster. We’d barely said hello before we were deep in nostalgia, trading stories about South Florida grandparents, the Rascal House deli, and the psychic importance of buckets of pickles (Jewish childhood canon). David fit right into our Coral Springs energy — the third seat at the cafeteria table we somehow always had waiting for him.
Once we officially remembered to welcome everyone to The Daily Whatever Show (Fucked-up Friday edition, as God intended), David introduced himself to anyone who didn’t already know him from MSNBC, NBC, Fox News, or TYT — which is to say, if you’ve turned on cable news in the last 20 years, you’ve seen him. He joked that people over 90 know him from MSNBC and people under 40 know him as that guy from Rebel HQ. Honestly a flex.
From there we jumped straight into the conversation that all three of us keep circling back to: media is in an inflection point, and Trump’s reelection didn’t create the crisis — it just ripped the roof off. Legacy institutions are buckling under their own cowardice and complicity, while the fired, the fed-up, and the morally allergic are landing here: streaming on Substack, leading community-driven media.
David’s take was refreshingly blunt: if you’re starting out, skip the dying newsrooms. “Go straight to streaming. That’s where the audience is.”
We talked Blue Friday — our attempt to repurpose the day into something useful. As
said: don’t buy cheap crap. Invest in things (and people) who might move the map in 2026 and 2028. Think subscriptions, mutual aid, candidate support, independent media.From there, things got heavier, because it’s Fucked-up Friday and the world is a mess. We discussed the tragic killing of the two National Guard members in D.C., including Sarah Beckstrom, and the deeply complicated story behind the shooter — an Afghan translator who had been embedded with U.S. operations in the war. Mental health, PTSD, structural failures… issues that cross borders, politics, and communities. David’s point landed hard: our mental health system is so broken that red flags fall through every crack we have.
And then came the MAGA response — the deranged leap to blame Mark Kelly, followed by the equally unhinged shift to blaming Joe Biden when the facts changed. David’s Fucked Up Friday pick highlighted how fast disinformation mutates, how unserious our political culture has become, and how completely Twitter (yes, we still call it Twitter) has warped public reasoning.
We ended with three pitches — mine, Lawrence’s, and David’s — all variations on a theme: extremist cruelty, broken institutions, and a country failing to grapple with the real root causes of violence. Not light, but real. And threaded through the whole episode was gratitude: for the chat, for our community, for holiday pies, and for the joy of hosting someone like David who brings smart, sharp humanity into the room.
Happy Blue Friday, everyone. Let’s keep building the little engine that could.
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